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POLITICAL BOOK CLUBS

BRYCE ON HISTORY

– A tremendous way to learn American history.

Recently I wrote a column on citizenship where I mentioned American History is being taught in our schools rather superficially. From this, I received e-mails asking how people can become more proactive in terms of learning history outside of school. To this end, I belong to a political book club which we started a couple of years ago. It took us awhile to find our footing in terms of organization and how to conduct the meeting but we worked it out and it is now an important club for raising the awareness of history.

The club meets at night on a monthly basis with members taking turns hosting it in their homes. One person volunteers to be the moderator for the meeting and is responsible for preparing an outline of questions pertaining to the book of the day, and controlling the conversation. The round-table discussion is perhaps the most rewarding part of the meeting as it is interesting to see how people interpret historical events.

As an aside, we encourage everyone to attend, whether they have read the book or not. The club also makes active use of the Internet and social media to communicate with club members and invite outsiders.

The following is a list of the books we slowly went through, over the first few years. Notice it starts at the founding of our country and slowly moves through the years.

*5000 Year Leap – this was an excellent book to begin our program as it is an easy read, yet serves as the foundation for the next few books. It is also a book which I believe all High School students should read as it would clear up a lot of misconceptions about our government.

**Democracy In America – De Tocqueville’s account of visiting the young United States is fascinating and describes the strength of our nation from an outsider’s perspective. Either try the condensed version or the four volume set.

As we are now in a new year, the club has already drawn up an impressive list of books to study. The members of the club come from all walks of life, including academia and business.

The book club has been an invaluable source of information to explain how our country works, why our governing documents were written in the manner they were, and who the real founding fathers of our country were. It is very educational and something I highly recommend to anyone who is truly interested in American history.

It is interesting what you can accomplish when you allow for civil discourse.